Mobile Suit Gundam: The Phoenix Saga
by Firebird 13
Summary: The year is Universal Century 300. As children, Jake Lake and Layla McKenzie always dreamed of becoming mobile suit pilots. Now in their 20's, these two childhood friends are about to find themselves in the middle of an unexpected and brutal war. One where the fate of the entire Earth Sphere hangs in the balance.


_**Author's Note: In the interest of telling the best story possible, I have written this fan-fiction as though G-Savior does not exist. Enjoy. :)**_

* * *

**Mobile Suit Gundam: The Phoenix Saga**

**Prologue**

In the wake of a legacy of rampant neglect and corruption, the Earth Federation has finally collapsed from within after a brief but vicious civil war.

Sick of the greed and selfishness of their government, a group of generals and diplomats formed the Neo Federation around the ideal of restoring not just Earth, but the entire Earth Sphere to the peace and prosperity of the early Universal Century. For ten years, they slowly and quietly built up their forces and developed their strategy so that the war would end as quickly as possible. Finally, on June 1st, Universal Century 262, the Neo Federation attacked. The war lasted only months, with the Neo Federation launching a series of unforgiving attacks on critical targets. Caught unprepared and having already lost several key bases and production facilities, the Earth Federation surrendered unconditionally on October 21st.

In the aftermath of the war, the Neo Federation set about to create a truly unified Earth/Space government, feeling that it would be the best way to ensure that the needs of both the Earth and the Space Colonies were met. This understandably led to some quite vocal protests from those who felt that this signaled a return of the notoriously corrupt and Earthnoid-centric Earth Federation. To calm this unrest and prove their intentions, the Neo Federation established a new asteroid base, Unity Station, at the midpoint between Earth and the Colonies. Using Unity Station as their headquarters, the Neo Federation set out to make good on their promise of restoring the old prosperity of the Earth Sphere.

Over the next nineteen years, both Earth and the Colonies saw the fruits of the Neo Federation's efforts. Thanks to investments in science, health, and education, the Earth Sphere found itself well on track to entering a new golden age. Unfortunately, the peace would soon be disrupted. Unbeknownst to the Neo Federation, a Loyalist movement was brewing in the shadows, aiming to take revenge on the Neo Federation for overthrowing the Old Federation. On October 21st, UC 282, twenty years to the day of the Old Federation's surrender, the Loyalists attacked.

It is during this war that a young mobile suit engineer named Thomas Lake came to fame. Though the Neo Federation had numbers, its mobile suit designs were not up to par. They either sacrificed speed and agility for armor and firepower, or vice versa. As a result, they were significantly out-performed by the more balanced Loyalist machines. Facing the prospect of a long and costly war, the Neo Federation launched the Balance Initiative, an engineering competition to design a new generation of mobile suits that could compete with those being fielded by the Loyalists.

While the other entrants based their designs on the Neo Federation's current roster of mobile suits, Thomas Lake took a different approach. He took the new generation idea to heart and instead designed a brand new mobile suit based on the Gundam designs of the past. Dubbing it the Hi-Za, Thomas Lake's mobile suit was an almost perfect blend of speed and firepower. In addition to the standard beam rifle, beam saber, and head vulcans, the Hi-Za was also armed with a pair of shoulder mounted missile racks and a single Variable Speed Beam Rifle. To offset the additional weight and power requirements of its armament, the Hi-Za also came equipped with a more powerful generator and thruster pack, increasing its speed and maneuverability by 45% over its contemporaries. Though it would be significantly more expensive to produce than it's competing designs, it was also the only one that consistently outperformed Loyalist mobile suits in simulated battles, and so won the competition.

The Hi-Za was put into production almost immediately, with the first prototypes being completed within three months. When these prototypes were field tested in actual combat, the Neo Federation was surprised by how well they performed. In one battle, a single Hi-Za was able to take down an entire squad of enemy suits with little more than superficial damage. Thrilled with its success, the Neo Federation halted all production of its existing suits in order to mass-produce the Hi-Za in as great of numbers as possible. Though this was initially an unpopular decision, it soon proved to be the right one, as the Loyalist forces found themselves unable to compete with the ever-increasing number of Hi-Za's appearing on the battlefield. After suffering a series of crushing defeats at the hands of the Neo Federation and their new mobile suits, the Loyalists surrendered on October 21st, UC 283, bringing an end to what would soon become known as the Second One Year War.

In the wake of his tremendous success with the Hi-Za, the Neo Federation hired Thomas Lake as their chief mobile suit designer and sets about repairing the damage caused by the Loyalists. As the Loyalists were the ones who had started the war, the Neo Federation demanded they pay reparations. Though many thought this was a fair deal, still others just wanted to forget the war ever happened and move on, and felt that forcing the Loyalists to pay reparations was the action of an arrogant government kicking an already defeated enemy. Fearing a return to the corrupt days of old, many of these people went underground and began plotting ways to take action.

Taking advantage of this, extreme remnants of the Loyalist movement joined the Underground and began stoking these fears. They claimed that not only was it just a matter of time before the Neo Federation fell into corruption, but that since their leadership was comprised of former leaders of the Old Federation, their revolution hadn't a revolution at all. It had been a coup, designed so that they could take control of the entire Earth Sphere and install their own dictatorship.

As the years went on and on, the continued and increasing prosperity of the Earth Sphere did nothing to quell these extremists and if anything, it only made them more and more extreme. They claimed that one day, the leaders of the Neo Federation would turn around and take all of that prosperity away from the people and hoard it for themselves. While the more moderate members of the Underground became increasingly uncomfortable and left, the passionate rhetoric also inspired more and more Loyalist supporters to join. Slowly but surely, the Underground Loyalists began to gain more than they lost, and this inspired their leaders to ever-greater heights, even going public with their rhetoric and propaganda.

It is around this time, in UC 289, that a passionate and charismatic Loyalist by the name of Jacob Mizrahi rose to fame. He began to claim that the only way the Colonies would ever enjoy true peace and prosperity was by completely eliminating the Neo Federation. He told the story of how during the Second One Year War, his wife had been killed in a Neo Federation raid and his eldest son had been disfigured. The Neo Federation vehemently denied this raid ever took place, but also began investigating Jacob as a potential threat. Jacob in turn used this to argue that the Neo Federation was only doing so because they wanted to keep him from speaking the truth. This rallied even more supporters to his side, and he eventually became the leader of the Underground Loyalists.

It is at this point that Jacob Mizrahi took the group back underground and began preaching ever more violent and dangerous rhetoric. He even went so far as to lionize Char Aznable, claiming as he did that the real reason for war and violence was that the Earth's gravity was holding humanity's souls down to their body's base instincts. With the Underground Loyalists now fanatically devoted to him, Jacob began claiming that the only way to achieve true, everlasting peace was to destroy the Earth entirely. He and his followers then took this message to Side 3, rechristening themselves the Sons of Zeon in an effort to draw even more support by capitalizing on the Side's storied resentment of all things Federation. It worked. With the support of an entire colony cluster behind him, Jacob began the process of militarizing the Sons of Zeon.

Over a decade later, on January 1st, Universal Century 300, Jacob Mizrahi and the Sons of Zeon finally made their move


End file.
